The good lives model proposes
at least 10 primary human goods that are thought to be common to all
individuals which, when secured, contribute to enhanced well-being and life
satisfaction. Prosocial attainment of primary human goods is thought to promote
desistance from crime. However, individuals convicted of sexual offenses face
significant obstacles upon their reentry into the community that likely
undermine their ability to obtain such goods. The current study explored the
pursuit and attainment of primary human goods in a U.S. sample of men convicted
of sexual offenses. We interviewed 42 men released into the community to
examine the extent to which they desired and pursued primary human goods.
Results highlighted that participants valued many of the human goods outlined
in the good lives model, but their means to achieve them were restricted
considerably by their correctional status. “Interpersonal relationships” and
“life/survival” emerged most frequently during the interviews and were
identified as the two most important goods. We discuss the negative impact of
recent policies on participants’ ability to pursue and attain human goods as
well as the value of attending regular treatment in obtaining the goods of
“knowledge” and “community.” Implications for policy and directions for future
research are provided.

The idea for this article came from a
series of conversations that I (DH) had with colleagues at a time when I was
trying to make sense of the themes that had emerged from my desistance
interviews. I was familiar with the main tenets of the Good Lives Model (GLM),
and I observed a natural congruence between the optimism of that approach and
what I had seen in the emerging literature on desistance from crime.

We (DH & AP) used the Life
History Interview Protocol to interview men who had been convicted of sexual
crimes, served time in custody, and then been released into the community. The
interview questions included specific items about some of the PHGs (such as
pursuit of mastery, spirituality, and relationships) but we noted during our
analysis that many men also spoke of the severe limitations and challenges that
they experienced in pursuing and achieving other PHGs. We decided to revisit
the transcripts and look for mentions of the PHGs that emerged spontaneously to
explore the extent to which the men wanted to pursue, had tried to attain, had
successfully achieved, or had been restricted from pursuing them. The guiding
hypothesis was that the pursuit and successful attainment of PHGs would
facilitate what criminologists call “desistance from crime.”

What kinds of challenges did you face
throughout the process?

One of the biggest hurdles was the
need to legitimize qualitative methodologies in an area where quantitative
approaches are far more typical. There are many reasons why desistance research
lends itself to qualitative research and in-depth interviewing, but there is a
clear bias against those findings (and approaches) by a field that has largely
been built upon the meta-analyses of much larger samples. Desistance is best
defined as a process, and is therefore not well understood using
cross-sectional data or quantitative approaches at discrete points in time
(e.g., risk assessment scores). Understanding desistance means understanding
one’s life story; the details and nuances of which cannot be dichotomized
without losing data quality. Exploring a life story means asking in-depth
questions that sometimes yield meandering answers. It means asking for
clarification on temporal variables, ensuring you’ve got the story straight,
and honouring the longitudinal nature of how someone’s story has unfolded and
continues to unfold. We felt the richness of those stories could only be
authentically represented through qualitative methods. Above all else, the fact
that we know so little about the life histories, offending trajectories, and
transitions of these men (on an individual level) necessitates that we use a
qualitative approach. For us, this early work on understanding the important
phenomenon of desistance must occur within the “context of discovery.”

“Relationship status” is a good
example of a variable that is better captured by a long quotation than by a
spreadsheet. Marriage is usually a dichotomous variable - a simple yes/no. It
might be operationalized as “legally married at the time of the index offense,”
or “ever lived with a lover for two years.” But these simplistic distinctions
offered only inadequate ways of describing our sample: Roy was married for 23
years but admits to cheating on his wife (and fathering children with other
women) repeatedly; Jacob has had a few long-term, committed relationships with
men, Rodney was married four times: twice happily, and twice dysfunctionally;
Clay was married for a long time but frequently abused his wife. Quite frankly,
after the interviews, there was too much detail to put in a table!

What do you believe to be the
main things that you have learnt about desistance?

One of the most compelling findings
to come from desistance research so far, is that for many or most of the
samples we work with, desistance from sexual crime is as natural and widespread
as it is from nonsexual crime. Most people who have engaged in these acts come
to no longer do so. Understanding how and why that transition occurs (with,
without, or in spite of the various interventions that we prescribe and
enforce) is a research question that deserves more attention. Thinking about
the positive elements of a person’s life, seeing them as more than the worst
thing they have ever done (or more accurately—been caught for) is also an important
lesson from this work. The realization that someone can do bad things and not
be a bad person forever, or can do bad things and then not do them anymore
challenges a lot of approaches (and assumptions) that are well-entrenched in
this space. Finally, as we continue to examine the extent to which our
participants are “successful” upon release, it is increasingly necessary and
meaningful to look beyond “recidivism” and “risk factors” as the only variables
of interest.

Now that you’ve published the
article, what are some implications for practitioners?

Although the men in our study experienced profound
difficulties in pursuing and attaining PHGs, a key finding that emerged was
that attending a treatment program provided a source of several PHGs, including
a sense of belonging (“community”) and knowledge.In the context of increasingly restrictive
policies and legislation it is easy to focus on challenges that our clients
face and lose hope that they will ever live a better life. But if we lose hope,
so will our clients. It is important that we frame treatment as an activity
designed to assist clients to find meaning and purpose in their lives, rather
than something they must do. By creating safe and supportive treatment
environments where PHGs can be realised, practitioners can help facilitate and
support the natural desistance process.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

A conference presenter, who really
should remain anonymous, once adopted a faux Biblical tone in commenting on the
history of attempts to treat people who have sexually abused: “In the
beginning, there was relapse prevention.” This was inaccurate, of course; many
people, including Nicholas Groth and Albert Ellis had been developing treatment
methods prior to the adoption of relapse prevention (RP) from the addictions
world. However, many a truth is told in jest, and in this instance, the
presenter was completely accurate in recalling how the phrase relapse
prevention took hold of treatment programs as much as the model and methods themselves.
The lead author has vivid memories of a colleague in the 1980s exclaiming, “If
you’re not doing RP, you’re not doing treatment.”

Setting aside the competitive
jealousy and premature and incorrect assumption that there is a single right
way to do treatment, one has to have some sympathy for the professionals
operating at that time. There were no methods for classifying dangerousness and
little research to guide these efforts. There was talk of a “forensic sound
barrier” in risk assessment that might never be broken (set as a correlation of
.40). It was perfectly natural that at a time in which professionals knew less
about what they were doing than today, the field would focus, obsess even, on
risk and risk reduction.

Fast forward to just a few years
ago, and much had changed. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, professionals
involved in assessing and treating youth who had sexually abused were starting
to empirically examine “protective factors”, those elements in a youth’s life
that mitigate risk or assist him or her from growing beyond their past harmful
actions. In around 2002, when the second edition of the influential book, Motivational Interviewing, came out,
professionals began to adopt this approach as a part of their treatment
protocols. In each case, some professionals became early adopters while others
dismissed these methods as fads. Similar responses happened with the emergence
of the Good Lives Model and trauma-informed care.

An area that is rarely discussed,
however, is how adherents to one core idea or set of ideas seem to view other
sets of ideas as more different than they actually are. Although much
discussion is never published, it has not been uncommon to hear one claim that
motivational interviewing is nice but not strengths-based; one might just as
well criticize strengths-based approaches as being nice, but not addressing the
ambivalence that people often have about change, especially when addressing
sexual violence. The simple fact is that both approaches have very similar
features in common. Indeed, sometimes the greatest difference is in the
language used to describe them. Likewise, many have mistakenly described the
principles of effective correctional treatment (risk, need, and responsivity)
and the Good Lives Model as if they were irreconcilably different (in truth,
one can deliver treatment in a way that is adherent to both). The same goes for
resilience-based approaches and trauma-informed care. Each approach can be
implemented poorly, and each share (when properly implemented) a great deal of
their conceptual underpinnings.

It often seems we are describing
the same basic elements of treatment with different words. How can
professionals rise above this Tower of Babel? Perhaps the most important place
to start is by understanding the limitations of language itself. In recent
articles and presentations, Tony Ward has warned against reifying “factors”,
whether risk or protective, and focusing on the processes that underlie them.
In other words, if we only think in terms of factors, we may neglect the
processes that make up those factors. For example, if we think primarily of
relationship stability as it is defined within risk assessment measures, we may
take needed focus away from how that stability has manifested elsewhere in a
person’s life.

These problems extend beyond how
we talk about “treatment” and “factors” by treatment providers; it reflects a
big Tower of Babel issue across the field as a whole. Different parts of the
sexual abuse field including, but not limited to police, probation, parole,
treatment providers, and third-party organizations not only use the term
“treatment” to explain their processes but also“rehabilitation”, “Risk Management” and “Public Protection”. This too is
problematic as the non-common language and definitions lead to one single,
problematic outcome measure – risk of recidivism. While “risk management” and “public
protection” maybe neatly lead to a reduction in reoffending, this is not the
main outcome of treatment and the main driver of factors involved with it. The Tower
of Babel issue in defining what happens with perpetrators by default shapes the
outcomes, success rates, and successful (re)integration of people who have
abused. Maybe we should try to stop calling everything apples and recognize
that we have a variety of fruit at our disposal. Those pieces of fruit look and
feel different but ultimately contribute to the same goal: our health! They
don’t all do it in the same way and that’s fine!

In the end, as we continue to move
from a nothing works agenda towards a what works one (all the while fighting a
backslide) all professionals will benefit from attention to both the continuing
evolution of our field as well as the subtleties of the language within it.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

We are exhausted. As
“survivor scholars” - sex crimes scholars who are also public rape survivors -
we have dedicated our lives and careers to understanding sexual victimization,
why it happens, how to prevent it, and how to best live in the aftermath of rape.

We get it. We have lived
it. And we’re exhausted.

The #metoo movement
offered the promise of elevating the voices of individuals who had experienced
sexual harassment and victimization. At first, we were inspired and excited
that people were sharing their experiences and would be silenced no more.
However, very quickly we both became disillusioned and concerned about the
potential conflation of terms and the backlash the movement would face.
Simultaneously, we were troubled by apparent blinders still worn by so many in
the movement who continue to isolate and exclude the voices of marginalized
people, including men, trans and gender non-conforming people, indigenous, and
racial and ethnic minorities.

However, our biggest
cause for alarm continues to be the conflation of all forms of sexual
misconduct, where no distinction is made. Some activists have argued that we
should never have to differentiate between rape, sexual assault and sexual
harassment.

In our professional
opinions, guided by years of accumulated knowledge, and our personal
experiences with both rape and sexual harassment, we wholeheartedly believe
that making these distinctions is necessary if we are to have critical and
meaningful dialogue moving forward.

We acknowledge that the
grouping of all forms of sexual misconduct is not meant to intentionally
minimize the trauma of individuals who have experienced rape. However, the
unintentional consequences of this grouping does exactly that. This is
not to discount the trauma of sexual assault or harassment. In fact, the
distinction we are making is to honor the trauma caused by all forms of sexual
misconduct, while acknowledging that they are fundamentally different. We do
not see our beliefs as mutually exclusive.

Though the impact of the
#metoo movement has yet to be revealed, we question what the overarching goal
is. What do we want to achieve? Based on our own personal experiences, our
professional read of the research, and our interactions with fellow survivors
and activists, we believe that the ultimate goal is to eradicate sexual
violence. The question becomes how do we realize this goal.

Ending sexual violence
in all its forms is only possible when there is space for individuals who
have experienced it to be heard and supported and space for individuals
who perpetrated these actions to take responsibility. When we shame a person
for what some see as an insufficient apology, we further silence those who
would consider publicly acknowledging their part in perpetrating any or all
forms of sexual violence.

Trying people in the
court of public opinion and calling for them to disappear will never lead to
healing and will never prevent these types of offenses from occurring. Shaming
is ineffective at best and at its worst can lead to an increase in the very
behaviors we are trying to prevent. In The Gifts of Imperfection, shame
and vulnerability researcher Dr. Brene Brown states that, “shame corrodes the
very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

We are at a crossroads.
We have the power and the capacity to make real and lasting changes. This
requires that we be willing to lean into uncomfortable conversations and
realities about how and why sexual victimization occurs. We cannot expect
change if we do not honor the importance of voices and lived experiences both
of people who have experienced sexual harassment, assault, and rape, and people
who have perpetrated these offenses.

We fully recognize and
expect that many people will fundamentally disagree with our stance. We
acknowledge and respect those opinions and welcome the uncomfortable dialogues
that will inevitably ensue. We formulated this path forward based on our lived
experiences as survivors and criminal justice professors who believe that our
current approach to sexual violence does not reduce harm, bring closure, or
prevent future offenses.

Kieran McCartan, PhD

Chief Blogger

David Prescott, LICSW

Associate blogger

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The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (http://atsa.com/) is an international, multi-disciplinary organization dedicated to preventing sexual abuse. Through research, education, and shared learning ATSA promotes evidence based practice, public policy and community strategies that lead to the effective assessment, treatment and management of individuals who have sexually abused or are risk to abuse.

The views expressed on this blog are of the bloggers and are not necessarily those of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research & Treatment, or Sage Journals.

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